Dan Carpenter: The one-sided mentality of Mitch Daniels' Purdue

Aug. 20, 2013

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Back in the waning heyday of a larger-than-life basketball coach, a friend declared to me that there was no better television than “The Bob Knight Show” after a loss.

Many were the merry moments, for sure; but the all-time highlight had to be the time Coach decided to dramatize his “Purdue mentality” shtick by trotting out a donkey wearing a Boilermaker hat.

Long ago, and forgettable. So what makes me think of it now? How about one you-gotta-be-kidding-me moment after another, a running joke that Purdue, through its Mitch Daniels-appointed trustees, has played on itself.

The latest revelation, that Daniels as governor wanted to foist Big Bill Bennett’s “history” book, “America: The Last Best Hope,” on Hoosier K-12 students, affirms a politician’s mentality toward education that chauvinists and profiteers have long dreamed of installing as the Purdue-IU-Michigan-Yale-You Name It mentality.

Supplanting critical studies of a great and flawed nation with romanticized, nakedly partisan propaganda may comfort the average conservative voter as much as it serves the military-industrial complex that a great soldier statesman named Eisenhower warned us about. It will not serve us well as the most powerful actor on a world stage where shame and suffering, as well as peace and justice, bear our mark. Nor is it compensated for by fundraising prowess.

It’s not as if Bennett ignores such inconveniences as slavery and crimes against the native people. The problem is that he, like Daniels in his own laughable book and like Ronald Reagan, for whom Bennett was education secretary, dispatches the negatives as aberrations from which we’ve moved on, repeats that we’re still better than anybody else and impugns the loyalty of those who would have us confront the realities of greed, racism and empire-building. That’s the politician’s mentality. Howard Zinn is not above criticism, as the nation for which Zinn fought in a war is not; but his controversial work at least is an intellectual exercise.

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Anti-intellectualism has consequences. If we are not taught about our government’s role in opposing Haiti’s independence, propping up its dictatorships, undermining its most popular president and ruining its agriculture, we might blame the destitute neighbor’s misery on its inferior people and treat its refugees as our charitable burden.

If we don’t know the Muslim Brotherhood was formed in opposition to British colonial rule, and we don’t know our CIA installed the hated Shah of Iran, and we don’t know Hugo Chavez tapped into anger over centuries of exploitation, we have a losing foreign policy.

If we don’t know Jim Crow, we may think Republicans are being only responsible in making voting more difficult.

If we don’t know all that much about the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Lincoln, we may not question the appropriation of “content of their character” and “last best hope” by ideologues neither of these highly intellectual political leaders would endorse.

If we haven’t studied the McCarthy era, we won’t recognize the current round of attacks on universities as recycled realpolitik.

Learn from it, or be doomed to repeat it. Be conservative, or be liberal; just don’t vindicate that jerk who called you a jackass.